Jimmy Dore Is Duped By Richard Gage

Jimmy Dore is a left wing comedian who is not afraid to tackle taboo subjects. A lot of the time he is right, but this time he is way off-beam. Recently, he interviewed Richard Gage about 9/11. If you haven’t heard of him, Gage is both a clown with credentials and a grifter of the worst possible kind. He is the founder of Architects & Engineers For 9/11 Truth. Like many cranks he believes or professes to believe that the Twin Towers were brought down on that terrible day not by a group of evil men who hijacked four commercial aircraft and crashed two of them into the buildings but by controlled explosions, ie pre-planted explosives.

A surprising number of otherwise highly intelligent men and women have been duped by this claim, some of them with even more impressive credentials than Gage. As usual, he begins his spiel with the claim that a third building collapsed that day, one that wasn’t hit by planes. Almost nobody knows this building collapsed, so this is a double mystery - the actual collapse and the suppression of the truth. Dore falls for this, which is surprising because he claims to have long been skeptical about the 9/11 attacks. Before going any further, let’s trash these lies about Building Seven.

This impressive structure was 47 storeys high, and would have been the tallest building by far in most of the world’s great cities. The suggestion that a building that size could have collapsed unnoticed is laughable. The most telling thing about its collapse is that not a single person died when it did so. What does that suggest? That the men on the ground knew it was in danger of collapsing and made sure it was evacuated, indeed they warned of its impending collapse at least two hours beforehand. Building Seven suffered massive structural damage when the Twin Towers collapsed, and in common with many buildings that have been set on fire, hit by earthquakes…it did so. It took seven hours, because that is the length of time fires burned in it out of control.

It doesn’t take much searching to find photographs and even videos of Building Seven hours prior to its eventual collapse, but grifters like Gage ignore these.

NIST carried out a thorough investigation into the collapse of Building Seven, an excellent summary of which can be found at this link. The narrator is Edward Current, who was once by his own admission a 9/11 Truther. Like Dore, he is also a comedian. It is truly remarkable that sometimes it takes a comedian to expose the absurd. Here is an actual cartoon strip, one for the cynics.

Not everything about the collapse of the Twin Towers or Building Seven has been released to the public, or rather their construction has been kept under wraps. This is for reasons of public safety. Modern buildings including those considerably less than 47 storeys in height are delicate, to put it mildly. They have to be, otherwise they would have to be hundreds of yards wide. Imagine those planes had been crashed into an Egyptian pyramid instead of the Twin Towers. How much damage would they have done?

The only mystery about the collapse of Building Seven is how it became a mystery. Gage and other cranks go a lot further though. One of the other claims they make is that explosions were heard in the Twin Towers before they collapsed. Seriously? Office equipment, refrigerators, even light bulbs can explode, sometimes deceptively loudly.

Was there any kind of cover-up in the wake of the attacks? Probably, but only out of embarrassment or diplomacy. Although the four planes were commandeered by 19 hijackers, there were actually 20 of them. A Saudi national named Mohammed Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani was refused entry to the United States because of suspicions that he was up to no good. He ended up in Afghanistan where he was captured in December 2001. Clearly, if one potential hijacker was refused entry to the country, it was theoretically possible that the others could have been too, or even arrested when boarding the planes.

It is not unlikely that other embarrassments were covered up, including direct warnings of the attacks that were not taken seriously. We will probably never know, but that doesn’t mean we should be taken in by the likes of Richard Gage, neither should Jimmy Dore.